About this website

This website is being hosted from my appartement, specifically from an Orange Pi Zero H2. The poor OPi has only 512MB of RAM and a 16GB SD card for storage. Besides functioning as a webserver, it also does email. Despite all that work, my little OPi only needs about one third of that 512MB ram for its job! But I'm a bit apprehensive to use my self-hosted email as a primary email address. After all, what if the OPi gives up, or my internet goes out for a bit? Having a stable email address has become as important as a home address, in the digital era.

Anyway, it's pretty great that people like me can host a website from home with just a $25-ish computer. Of course, that privilege is not reserved for all people. Many home networks have to share an IPv4 address with their neighbors, and IPv6 adoption has been slow. Furthermore, not everyone enjoys a 100Mbps up/down link. Who knows, maybe I won't have that luxury either at some point in the future!

The name of this website - thetubes.net - is a joke about the former U.S. Senator Ted Stevens. He argued in 2006 that the internet was like a series of tubes, and that the 'Internet' he had sent that morning (it was actually an email) had been delayed by several days because the 'tubes' were 'filled'. At this time, Ted Stevens was opposing an amendment that would enforce net neutrality, despite clearly having no idea what he was talking about. I thought it was a funny blunder that would make for a good domain name.